However, Tina could not have predicted that a normal person like Rentaro would approach her in this way.
Rentaro looked at the ceiling. Round two was about to begin.
Rentaro took four cartridges from his artificial arm and used them to refill his artificial leg, which had heated up. He changed the magazine of his XD gun. He pulled the SureFire military flashlight from his waist and held his XD in his right hand and the flashlight in his left. Crossing his arms, he climbed the stairs with the backs of his hands together.
Of course, there was no electricity, so he could not use the elevator. Even if there was electricity, it was unthinkable to use something that would ding and report his arrival to his opponent. Climbing the stairs cautiously, he reviewed what he knew in his head.
Tina Sprout was an Initiator with the Owl Gastrea Factor. The majority of owls are nocturnal, but good night vision is not their only distinguishing characteristic. What was to be feared even more is their keen hearing that can pick out even the faintest sound from the movement of their prey. It was completely natural to imagine that Tina’s hearing was also very good. From here on out, he would have to do his utmost to not make a sound.
The moonlight shone on the bluish-white world, the air on his skin was chilly, and it became silent.
Being careful as he stepped, Rentaro muttered to himself that this was the first time he had fought this way, now that he thought about it. Both Kohina Hiruko and Enju Aihara were the straightforward martial artist types who didn’t use a lot of tricks. Compared to them, the person Rentaro was facing now, Tina Sprout, was a soldier type, like him. Someone who used guns to get around traps and was good at handling explosives. This was an enemy who would do any kind of sneak attack to win. If he let his guard down for a second, he would be killed.
He was carefully keeping his footsteps silent as he made his way to the roof, but when he got there, all he saw was an abandoned antitank rifle and empty magazines scattered around it. There was no sign of Tina. She must have hidden on one of the floors.
First, he would go one floor down to the floor he had just passed.
The floor was divided into three rooms. The instant he got to one of them, Rentaro sensed that something was off and stopped. It was dark. It was too dark. It wasn’t that his vision wasn’t working, but that there wasn’t even moonlight shining in. All the windows had probably been sealed. Why? It was obvious. His opponent had night vision and keen hearing. She could move perfectly fine even in the dark.
There were two shell casings lying on the ground at the entrance to the floor. Under normal circumstances, he would be convinced that Tina was concealed here. But Rentaro wasn’t sure after he saw them. Why would she leave shell casings on the floor on purpose? It was as if she was advertising her presence.
If that was the case, then he would have to work out a Plan B.
Rentaro fished around in the pouch around his waist and pulled out a bundle of something made of carbon. Rentaro pushed a button to make it return to its original shape, and what had been a folded frame instantly took on a ball shape, and a sensor inside it activated.
It was a pocket sensor package he had gotten from Miori. It had a thermal sensor and motion sensor, and if there was anything moving inside other than Rentaro, it was linked to Rentaro’s smartphone and would send an alert with the enemy’s position.
Rentaro threw the pocket sensor inside. He waited for a while, but there was no response. But with just that, he was still nervous about rushing in.
Rentaro pulled out a stun grenade and pulled the pin out with his teeth. Concealing his body against the wall, he waited for the sound and light of the explosion to pass and then went in. Using his flashlight to look around, Rentaro cursed involuntarily. It was spacious inside, and there were stone pillars in a few places, but like on the roof, Tina was not there.
It had been a decoy after all. With the explosion just now, Tina definitely knew which floor Rentaro was on. Rentaro started to feel like he was suffocating. With Tina’s specially evolved sight and hearing, a stun grenade, which spread sound, light, and pressure, would have been perfect to use against her. But he had just used it up.
Now that he thought about it, Rentaro realized that he had not seen Tina once since this battle started. Was Tina Sprout really in this building? The sudden horrifying thought clouded his mind, and he shook his head. No way, what was he thinking? His mind was filled with anxiety and fear and wasn’t thinking straight.
Amazed at how the darkness that prevented him from seeing was able to take away a person’s reason and presence of mind, Rentaro went down to the next floor. Its layout was exactly the same as the floor above, with the same forest of stone pillars in the sprawling space. Holding his gun ready, he hid himself behind the pillars, carefully examining the whole floor.
Just then, he was startled by the sound of an alert on his phone. Hurriedly pulling out his phone, he saw that the pocket sensor he had thrown earlier had picked something up upstairs. A chill went down his spine. It was impossible. Even as he tried to make himself believe that it had picked up a mouse or something else that just happened to pass through, the alert continued to ring noisily, as if screaming.
He was sure that Tina had not been in that room. Unless Tina was able to appear and disappear like a ghost?
Then, he saw the emergency exit out of the corner of his eye and suddenly understood. That should connect to the outer stairs. Of course, the outer stairs of a skyscraper would get a lot of wind, and in order to prevent falls, it would be strictly locked. It was probably never used by anyone other than the building manager and the janitors. However, what if Tina had unlocked it ahead of time? What if she had escaped out the emergency exit to the outer stairs when Rentaro threw the stun grenade inside, waiting for the opportunity to return?
Instantly, he pulled out his spare XD and held both guns, with his left hand pointed at the outer stairs, and his right hand pointed at the inner stairs he had just come down. His breathing got shallower and shorter, and he almost screamed in fear. The alert grating his nerves would not stop. It was as if it was saying, “Run away! Run away!”
Suddenly, the sound broke off, the sensor stopped ringing, and a heavy silence fell. The tension left his shoulders. It was some kind of animal after all, right?
Holding one of his guns with his teeth, he used the freed hand to pull out his smartphone and looked at the screen. He saw the words SENSOR CRASH in big letters across the screen and felt a chill down his spine like he had been put into a block of ice. The sensor had not stopped ringing, it had been destroyed. That meant that Tina was—
Just then, he heard a noise. He turned his head up quickly toward it, and a Rank 98 battle demon rained down with pieces of concrete. Rentaro looked at the scene in despair. It was unexpected revenge for the move Kisara had used to destroy the floor during the shooting incident at the Tendo Civil Security Agency.
Even as Rentaro paled, he put all his strength into his roundhouse kick that was aiming for Tina’s neck to use as a spring to escape. A terrifying faint buzz passed near his ear, and he started pouring cold sweat. He rolled forward like that a few times, pulling the triggers on the XD guns in both hands, firing as much as he could to shower Tina in bullets.
Tina held out a one-touch unfolding polycarbonate shield and took the whole barrage of twenty-four bullets.
Both of Rentaro’s XDs ran out of bullets at the same time. Tina must have decided that was a good time to throw away the cracked shield and plunged toward him with the speed of a bullet.
In the civsec officer combat manual, they were told to avoid a close-in fight with an Initiator at all costs. Rentaro abandoned his XDs and gritted his teeth. He dropped his hips to intercept Tina. His artificial eye gave off heat as it spun, calculating at superspeeds. The moment Rentaro saw the reflection of the moonlight on the dagger in the darkness, he pulled back his right arm. Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 5—At the same time, a cartridge spun and was spit ou
t, and the smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils. “Kohaku Tensei!”
There was a screech. Tina’s flash like lightning and Rentaro’s superfast thrust clashed, and there was an explosion at the point of impact. The sand that had accumulated on the floor was blown away, and the shock wave shattered all the windows.
Both of them left skid marks on the ground as they were thrown back. Rentaro jumped for the XD that had fallen to the ground and reloaded it, pointing the muzzle at Tina, but that was when he gasped in surprise, realizing she had disappeared.
Rentaro cautiously held his gun ready as he stepped backward and hid behind a pillar. This was bad. The darkness was on her side. Her owl eyes could amplify the light and see into the darkness, and in the worst-case scenario, her owl ears could probably even pick out the sound of Rentaro’s breathing. How was he going to crush her advantage?
Just then, something bounced on the floor with a clang, and a round green object rolled before Rentaro’s eyes. All the hairs on Rentaro’s body stood on end—it was a fragmentation grenade. His mind went blank, and he kicked the hand grenade and then jumped to take cover.
There was an explosion. A number of fragments bit into his skin, tearing it away, and the intense pain burned into his brain. He had no time to writhe in agony. His brain was screaming that he should not be here.
Forcing all his muscles to move, he promptly rolled to the side, and the next instant, Tina’s kick fell right where Rentaro had just been, smashing the concrete road and all. Rentaro gave a roar and swung out to trip her. He got her, but Tina acrobatically put a hand on the ground and quickly backflipped to escape.
Tina reached her hand into the hem of her dress and threw out a round black object. After the faint activation sound, it floated with its single eye flashing and then headed toward Rentaro at full speed. There was no doubt about it. It was definitely a Shenfield Bit.
A fourth? Why would a scout approach him?
For some reason, he got terrible chills, and as he stood, he shot his gun a few times, but the Bit skillfully avoided all the bullets and closed in on him. Realizing that he was in trouble, Rentaro promptly pulled the pin of an incendiary grenade to ignite it, but the enemy was overwhelmingly faster. The single camera lens stared him in the eye, and the soulless machine seemed to smile creepily, narrowing its gaze.
Rentaro didn’t have time to be surprised before the Bit self-destructed at his chest. Thrown back by the large explosion that burned his skin, his body bounced on the floor before being thrown into a pillar, back first. He was in so much pain that he gritted his teeth until a molar splintered, and his vision started to go black.
Rentaro gave a sickening cough, and blood started to overflow from his mouth without stopping, the warm blood wetting his chest. Fluttering his heavy eyelids to look in front of him, he saw that Tina had two more Bits deployed around her, on guard against him.
Right between Rentaro and Tina was the incendiary grenade that Rentaro had pulled out. The ignition pin had been taken out, and the safety was off, but it didn’t explode no matter how much time passed. It was a dud. In the end, even luck had abandoned him. In any case, the range where the thermite reaction from the combustion of the incendiary grenade would have caused heat damage was too far away from Tina to do any good.
His clothes were scorched in the fumes of the explosion and gave off a terrible smell. Three large pieces of the Bit were stuck in his chest, like a grotesque art piece. He could not move another finger. Rentaro quietly shook his head left and right, and sighed shakily, enduring the pain in his injured lungs. She was too strong. Blood that wouldn’t stop flowing was dripping to the ground from different places of his body. Even though his skin was burned and blistered, because he was losing blood by the minute, his body started to feel frozen with cold.
Was he about to die? In a place like this? It didn’t make sense. His vision blurred, and his consciousness started to fade. In the back of his mind, memories of fun times flowed like a slideshow.
Suddenly, he remembered a movie he watched with Enju at a repertory cinema called Barry Lyndon. Apparently, it was made by a director named Kubrick, and after the movie was over, right before moving on to the credits, on a completely black screen, a written epilogue suddenly appeared.
GOOD OR BAD, HANDSOME OR UGLY, RICH OR POOR THEY ARE ALL EQUAL NOW, it had said. If that was the enlightenment reached by someone who lived many times what he lived, then it was too sad. It was too terrible a nihilism. He felt like he was getting sucked into the bottom of a dark hole.
It was cold. It was dark. Damn it.
Jeez, I’m dying.
“Rentaro.”
A familiar girl’s voice suddenly flowed into his slowly fading consciousness.
Just then, there was the sound of a sudden explosion. A thermite blaze shot up between them, and an inferno manifested. Rentaro was struck dumb. Was it the incendiary grenade?
Normally, it took only a few seconds between throwing the grenade at the target and the detonation.
If it were a very defective product, it could take dozens of seconds before it exploded. Something that didn’t explode after that was a complete dud. According to his body clock, it had been about a minute since he dropped the incendiary grenade. There was no way it would suddenly explode—
When he looked, he saw Tina with her arm raised covering her eyes. Doubts were raised in his head. Why? It was true that there was faint moonlight here, and it wasn’t like he couldn’t see anything. But looking at the struggling Tina covering her face, barely able to stand, let alone walk, it was as if she could not see anything at all.
Realization dawned on him. She actually could not see anything. Her owl night vision must have backfired, letting in too much light at once with its light amplification abilities, clouding her vision completely white.
Enju, was it you? Did you make this miracle happen?
This was a golden opportunity. His last chance. That’s right. He hadn’t lost yet.
I’m here bearing the hopes of Enju, Kisara, Sumire, Miori, and the Seitenshi.
There was a world he needed to return to.
There were people waiting for his return.
“It’s not over yet!!!!!”
He mustered the last of his strength. As blood streamed from his whole body, the puddle at his feet expanded rapidly. But, he didn’t care. He used the last of his strength to get into the Tendo Martial Arts Water and Sky Stance. He fired a leg cartridge and ignited the mobility thruster in his leg. Accelerating violently, he passed through the thermite blaze and jumped out in front of Tina. From Tina’s perspective, it looked as if Rentaro had jumped out of a curtain of hellfire at two thousand degrees Celsius.
“Raaaaaaagh!” he roared.
Going around the Shenfield that had come out to defend her, Rentaro stepped on Tina’s right leg with his boot and rammed into her with his shoulder.
Tendo Martial Arts Third Style, Number 9: Usarocho.
With a crack, Tina’s thin body was knocked away, and she let out a cry. When he rammed into her while stepping on her leg, it would be hard for her to absorb the shock, so if he got a good hit in, he could cause enough damage to turn her organs inside out.
Tina couldn’t help but totter a few steps forward.
Rentaro wasn’t one to pass up that chance.
“Tendo Martial Arts First Style, Number 15—”
With the sound of the explosion from a cartridge firing in his arm, he caught a fleeting glimpse of regret on Tina’s face.
“Oh n—,” she said.
“Unebi Koryuu!” The uppercut with intense destructive power broke the dagger Tina had drawn to defend herself and exploded. Tina’s body was blown back easily, and it smashed concrete as it made the ceiling cave in.
“Tendo Martial Arts Second Style, Number 4—” Rentaro stretched his right leg straight out and kept it straight as he raised it overhead. Like a baseball pitcher’s special stance, his leg was at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree angl
e with the bottom of his shoe facing the sky, and then became still.
Tina’s body became unstuck from the ceiling and fell down, powerlessly. Tina looked at him with weak eyes.
There were three consecutive blasts from his leg. The three empty golden shell casings spun as they were ejected, glittering as they reflected the swaying light of the flame.
The smell of gunpowder filled his nostrils.
In no time, all sound disappeared. The world was quiet and calm.
Rentaro closed his eyes.
“Inzen Jokahanameishi Burst!”
His heel came down in an axe kick like an iron hammer, hitting Tina cleanly. An extreme tremor shook the whole floor, and large parts of the floor caved in and fell through. The enormous energy of three shots of large-caliber cartridges blew Tina’s body away like sick leaves and then broke through the floor with a thunderous roar.
After a tremor so large it seemed like it would destroy the whole skyscraper, the noise finally stopped. Looking down, at the bottom of a hole that looked like a series of reflected mirrors, on a floor eight stories down, was Tina’s prone body. After going through eight floors, she had finally stopped, it seemed.
Tina was passed out at the center of the explosion, unable to continue fighting. The flames stretching up threw Rentaro’s long shadow on the floor. Rentaro let out a breath quietly and continued to be alert as he took the Infinite Stance. Then, his vision swayed, and before he knew it, Rentaro was also lying spread-eagle on his back. His head was pounding, and he was dizzy and nauseated. Even now, his body felt like it would disintegrate. I can’t believe I fought with this body, he thought in utter amazement as he stared at the ceiling.
He closed in on a sniper from 1.5 kilometers away and crushed her in close combat. Considering that the by-the-book tactic to deal with a sniper was called a counter-snipe, where you sniped the sniper, it made him realize just how crazy his strategy was.
Against a Perfect Sniper Page 19